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2017 ADHO Awards

The yearly ADHO conference is also the occasion for handing out a number of prizes. The triennial Antonio Zampolli Prize for a singular project or accomplishment was awarded at this year’s DH conference. In honor of its 30th anniversary, the 2017 Zampolli Prize has been awarded to the Text Encoding Initiative community. While the nomination and honor goes to the entire community, three foundational figures in the history of the TEI accepted the award in Montréal on behalf of the community as a whole: Nancy Ide (who as President of the ACH convened the initial meeting that led to the creation of the TEI), Michael Sperberg-McQueen (who in 1987 became Editor-in-Chief of the TEI), and Lou Burnard (who in 1989 became European Editor of the TEI).

Based on work conducted primarily in the classroom, Amanda Licastro’s paper, “Teaching Empathy Through Virtual Reality,” involves more than twenty instructors, student researchers, and partner organizations, and demonstrates the potential of the Digital Humanities to foster a deeper human understanding. By focusing on and exploring the question of empathy in an educational context, the project illustrates the possibilities that innovative teaching provides to the Digital Humanities (and vice versa), and the power of digital humanities to foster greater social engagement and understanding through digital humanities pedagogy.

“Word Vectors in the Eighteenth Century,” by Ryan James Heuser, is an innovative, clear and well-executed paper describing the use of a recently-innovated computational text analysis method to the research of Eighteenth Century texts. The project's approach exemplifies a thoughtful use of emerging techniques to augment the field of textual scholarship, and explores the potential impacts of methodology upon the attribution of semantic meaning, provoking new understandings of the text while focusing a wary eye on the inevitable and daunting risks of subjective bias.

Finally, ADHO awarded 14 bursaries, to a total of 16 students and early-career scholars, to support travel to DH2017 and in recognition of the excellence of their accepted conference submissions. Recipients of the 2017 ADHO bursaries were:

Katarzyna Anna Kapitan

Maria Moritz

Adam Mertel and Tomáš Glomb

Maciej Maryl

Joana Malta

Mishio Yamanaka

Anne R Siders

Cait McKinney

Molly Kalkstein and Julia Polyck-O'Neill

Christopher Leo Hench

Aina Abiodun Oluwasola

Ayaka Uesaka

María Cecilia Martino

Shaifali Arora

ADHO’s various prizes, including the student bursaries, are a very important instrument for the promotion of the digital humanities. It takes a lot of time and effort to make sure the process of preparing and publishing the calls for awards and selecting the winners is done in a careful and fair way. This work is done by the ADHO Awards Committee. In 2016-2017 this committee was chaired by Karina van Dalen-Oskam. Tomoji Tabata coordinated the selection of bursary award winners, Mark Algee-Hewitt chaired the Zampolli Prize Committee, and Micki Kaufman was responsible for organizing the Fortier Prize. As in previous years, the winners of the Fortier Prize were selected with the help of a group of anonymous referees attending the papers that had been nominated at the start of the conference. Many thanks to all!